Last Night in New York, Kabarett Voltaire. By John Shand September 7, 2004 ? Ground Zero ... Wednesday Kennedy talks the walk. Seymour Centre, September 4 Aeroplanes flying into skyscrapers. Images of everlasting horror. The impossible made real, and the world changed forever. The attacks of September 11, 2001, touched us all, even here, 22 nervous flying hours from the epicentre. After the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were reduced to rubble, the public response was left to George Bush and his cronies in America and around the world. Talk about compounding a tragedy. The exception was the performance poet and actress Wednesday Kennedy. Originally a Sydneysider, Kennedy happened to be in New York that day, and for the next month she filmed, recorded and interviewed her way into the heart of the trauma. The results have been edited and interspersed with her delivery of a live, spoken-word component - part poetry, part reportage - for a package running about 50 minutes. Kennedy's perspective helps make the unreal real, and even if we cannot make sense of it, we can sense the making of the America that would soon wage wars in response. She did not catch the attack on the towers on camera, nor has she used stock footage. Rather, she has opted to create an audio montage of the initial catastrophe, thereby engaging our imaginations rather than shocking us anew. A sense of apocalypse leaps at you, whether metaphorically - a sale sign that screams 'Final Days' in a shop window - or more literally, with a bull-necked New Yorker urging the nuking of the entire Middle East. Although she captures heated exchanges in the streets to illustrate the diverse of points of view, the question of 'why?' is barely mentioned. At first this seemed a monumental flaw, until I realised she was merely reflecting the ignorant insularity which characterised America before the evil was perpetrated, and which would soon result in at least two wars of revenge, but no Palestinian state to neutralise the hatred. There are bizarre stories of McDonald's and KFC having 'emergency' mobile units to feed the workers at Ground Zero, and footage of mobile evangelical broadcasters cruising the streets and blasting out the message of the one true faith. It is sensational filmmaking, which is lent an added layer of density by Kennedy's lively spoken material, even if this is not always quite as successful. Last Night in New York plays this Friday and Saturday, 8.15pm,